¿Opinion: Andrew Grimes

On the last evening of his ownership or tenancy of a house before moving on to a new address, a certain sort of man may be observed digging up a fair sized patch of his back garden. Hyper-suspicious neighbours might wonder if he is digging a grave for a rancorous female companion, and think of calling the police. But they will have got things hopelessly topsy turvy.

On the last evening of his ownership or tenancy of a house before moving on to a new address, a certain sort of man may be observed digging up a fair sized patch of his back garden.

Hyper-suspicious neighbours might wonder if he is digging a grave for a rancorous female companion, and think of calling the police. But they will have got things hopelessly topsy turvy.

All the chap is doing is disinterring a long dead dog, so that, stowed in the boot of his car, it can accompany him behind the furniture van.

Everyone of sensitivity accepts that a dog, or come to that a cat, is for life. But should this voluntary and humane obligation continue after it is dead?

I would personally have thought not: Fido dead is surely, if sorrowfully, more decently done by in a vet’s crematorium, than left for worms and foxes under turf.

However, several thousand of my fellow dog and cat lovers disagree.

This country is full of domestic gardens manured by the mouldering remains of dogs whose tails have long ceased to wag and of cats whose claws have ceased to scratch.

When some people move house, they dig up all of their decomposed companions for solemn reburial amid their new home’s flow beds and cabbage patches.

Rosemary Rogers, director of an agency for furniture removers, says that occasionally it can be zoological exhumation on a grand scale.

She notes, in a survey, that if you have lived in the same house for 30 years, you may well have lived out at least three or four dogs and at least as many cats.

Suppose you planted each of them in the back garden, along with all the kids’ pet hamsters and rabbits and pussy-murdered pet rats.

It isn’t just a few garden’s plants you have to shift (if you must) elsewhere. It’s a sizeable cemetery.

Fifty of Ms Rogers’ removal firms reported that their vans been conscripted into joining the latest mournful episode in a peripatetic cortege. In one case, a client was moving a dead dog to its fifth posthumous address.

A dog is not only for life—in some rare cases, it is for eternal life, or at least, for peripatetic transportation.

However, some people who move house are so mean that they will rip out all the light fittings, strip off all the wallpaper and carry off the toilet seat and front door just for the joy of denying these useful facilities to the newcomers moving in.

These misanthropes, I feel, are just as likely to dig up and re-bury their dead dogs. They can’t bear the thought of someone else making use of good, rich fertiliser.

All rise - for the councillors in a lap-dance club

ALL 12 members of Cornwall council’s ‘miscellaneous licensing committee’ have voted themselves a free trip around the Duchy’s lap- dancing clubs to see exactly if they make their money within health and safety regulations.

“We will make the trip as cost effective as possible,” promises their chairman Jim Flashman, 61, who confesses to never having thought of trying such lubricious entertainments before.

Tracy Earnshaw, a Newquay feminist who wants the clubs closed down, says: “The whole thing would be amusing if it wasn’t so fanciful, appalling and unnecessary. “

The planned tour reminds me of how, in the the swinging seventies, the late Lord Longford —nicknamed Lord Porn — carried out a similar investigation in a Copenhagen nightclub.

Only 10 minutes into the show, he rose to make an indignant departure.

But he was chased to the door by the manager who shouted: “But sir, sir, please wait. You haven’t seen the intercourse.”

One wonders if the Cornish councillors are more patient – and more broadminded.

One wonders, too, if they managed to keep their council seats in yesterday’s local government elections.